20 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 29, 2018
Since the election, Beijing intelligence has targeted Kushner as a key asset.
THE POLITICAL SCENE
SOFT TARGET
China's suspect courtship with Jared Kushner.
BY ADAM ENTOUS AND E VA N OSNOS
ILLUSTRATION BY BARRY BLITT
In early , shortly after Jared Kush-
ner moved into his new o ce in the
West Wing of the White House, he
began receiving guests. One visitor who
came more than once was Cui Tiankai,
the Chinese Ambassador to the United
States, a veteran diplomat with a post-
graduate degree from Johns Hopkins
University. When, during previous Ad-
ministrations, Cui had visited the White
House, his hosts received him with a
retinue of China specialists and note-tak-
ers. Kushner, President Trump's thirty-
seven-year-old son-in-law and one of
his senior advisers, preferred smaller
gatherings.
Three months earlier, Cui had been
in near-despair. Like many observers,
he had incorrectly predicted that Hil-
lary Clinton would win the elec-
tion; his botched forecast, he told a
friend, was precisely the kind of error
that dooms the careers of ambassadors
in the Chinese diplomatic system. To
make matters worse, Cui knew almost
nobody in the incoming Administra-
tion. Donald Trump had won the elec-
tion in part by singling out China for
"raping" the United States.
In Kushner, Cui found a confident,
attentive, and inexperienced counter-
part. The former head of his family's
real-estate empire, which is worth more
than a billion dollars, Kushner was in-
tent on bringing a businessman's sen-
sibility to matters of state. He believed
that fresh, confidential relationships
could overcome the frustrations of tra-
ditional diplomatic bureaucracy. Henry
Kissinger, who, in his role as a high-
priced international consultant, main-
tains close relationships in the Chinese
hierarchy, had introduced Kushner to
Cui during the campaign, and the two
met three more times during the tran-
sition. In the months after Trump was
sworn in, they met more often than
Kushner could recall. "Jared became Mr.
China," Michael Pillsbury, a former
Pentagon aide on Trump's transition
team, said.
But Cui's frequent encounters with
Kushner made some people in the U.S.
government uncomfortable. On at least
one occasion, they met alone, which
counterintelligence o cials considered
risky. "There's nobody else there in the
room to verify what was said and what
wasn't, so the Chinese can go back and
claim anything," a former senior U.S.
o cial who was briefed on the meet-
ings said. "I'm sorry, Jared---do you think
your background is going to allow you
to be able to outsmart the Chinese Am-
bassador?" Kushner, the o cial added,
"is actually pretty smart. He just has
limited life experiences. He was acting
with naïveté."
By now, Americans are accustomed
to reports of Russia's e orts to influence
American politics, but, in the intelli-
gence community, China's influence op-
erations are a source of equal concern.
In recent years, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.
have dedicated increased resources to
tracking e orts by the Chinese govern-
ment to spy on or to enlist Western
o cials in pursuit of their policy goals.
(The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. declined to
comment on this.) "The Chinese in-
fluence operations are more long-term,
broader in scope, and are generally de-
signed to achieve a more di use goal
than the Russians' are," Christopher
Johnson, a former C.I.A. analyst who
specializes in China, said. "To be un-
kind to the Russians, you'd say they are
more crass."
Kushner often excluded the govern-
ment's top China specialists from his
meetings with Cui, a slight that rankled
and unnerved the bureaucracy. "He went
in utterly unflanked by anyone who
could find Beijing on a map," a former
member of the National Security Coun-
cil said. Some o cials who were not in-
vited to Kushner's sessions or briefed